Turning the Tide
by Abicion
Summary: Sirens are mythical beings known for luring hapless adventurers to their doom. Until now.


She found it. The voice in her head had given her enough vague clues to help her find the one tool that could save humanity. Too bad it didn't exactly look the part.

It was a small abandoned robot buried in the ruins of an old industrial plant. It looked a little like the bastard child of a Claptrap and a midget's hovercraft. Maybe those canisters attached to its sides contained some kind of compound that could be salvaged for fuel. Aside from that, Maya still didn't see how this machine would be able to change everything.

The bot suddenly sprang to life. Maya had no time to react before one of its hook arms caught her by the wrist.

"Target acquired. Initiating Protocol T-800."

The Guardian Angel was rambling in her head again, but now something seemed off. Instead of sounding like her usual imploring self, the Angel sounded distant and authoritative, almost emotionless.

Then Maya heard another voice coming from the robot itself.

"Maya, is it? Or are you the fire one? Both of you have been a giant pain lately and I have trouble keeping track." Handsome Jack was speaking over the radio receiver. The Angel had led her straight into a trap.

Maya aimed her pistol at the robot with her free arm, instantly filling the air with a storm of gunfire and shouting. The robot seemed to shake its upper canopy disapprovingly as round after round simply bounced off of its hull.

"Maya then. Defense drone, meet Maya. Maya, meet the latest advancement in Hyperion R&D, the… damn, where's that manual? Ah, thanks, Angel. It's called the M-1-N-D-T-P."

A second mechanical arm lashed around Maya's wrist and twisted the gun out of her grip. In response, she tried to focus all of her energy through her tattooed arm. With a little help from her Siren abilities, she would be able to dismantle the drone in the blink of an eye. She had already used her powers to fight off hundreds of enemies since hitting the Wastelands.

Nothing happened. The symbols on her arm weren't even glowing.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Jack chimed in. "You're not going to be Phasing your honeybuns out of this one, cupcake. You're dealing with a highly advanced automaton designed specifically for anti-Siren countermeasures. That equipment you're tangled in is made from refined Unobtainium. It's the most stable material in existence, which means it doesn't have to take shit from your sparkly universe-bending powers."

The two arms spun her around so her back was facing the robot. Additional limbs hooked her around the waist and under each arm. The robot pulled itself upward, securing itself to Maya's shoulders like an overly friendly jetpack. The hovercraft portion of the bot whirred to life, levitating her a few inches off of the ground.

"See, while I still don't have the faintest clue _what _you gals are, I do know a little bit more about how you work. An archeology dig here and salvaging a couple of databases there told me these little guys have been around for a while. It looks like all of you Sirens were engineered to be part of a single superhuman race. Or maybe you just made yourselves that way, who knows. Anyway, in case one of you ever went rogue, these guys were there as a safety precaution to remind you of your duty to the all-knowing Creator. Or Creators. I'm still not sure about that part, but it's sort of like their way of restoring you to your factory settings. You know, keeping an eye on the worker bees so they don't wander too far from the hive."

Maya wasn't in the mood for a history lesson, even if the only reason she had come to Pandora was to learn about her own origins. She thrashed her legs through the air as another compartment opened just behind her head.

"Of course, whoever those old Creator geezers were, they're probably long dead by now. I had to make some tweaks to this thing's processors when I was rebuilding it, so now you all-knowing Creator is going to be… me! Handsome Jack! Haha."

She twisted her head as far as the restraints would allow, doing anything she could to put up a fight. She was blocked off when a series of mechanical rings began measuring the precise circumference of her forehead.

"It's really quite fascinating. Despite the whole thing with your godlike powers and intellect, it turns out you Sirens just as mushy as the rest of us once you crack the egg open."

When the instrument had finished its measurements, a metallic dome descended over Maya's head. It left just enough space around her nose and mouth so she could breathe.

"It just took a lot of trial and error before I got this bad boy up and running again. Say, Angel, how many times did you go through the old cerebellum scrubber before you decided to be my lovely assistant?"

"Um… er…" Angel sounded like she was caught off guard.

"Right. I forgot she doesn't like to talk about that. Anyway, Maya-kins, basically this gizmo is just going to erase any trace of independent consciousness from your neural cortex while invasively modifying your Siren genes so you'll be upgraded to my personal living weapon. Angel tells me it's all a tad excruciating, but I'm sure you'll be a trooper."

Maya was now hovering several feet off the ground. She listened as the sound of an energy charge began humming from somewhere inside the robot. Even when the noise became deafening, Handsome Jack's gloating still managed to ring perfectly in her ears.

"Hang in there, sweety. It's almost over."

Maya screamed as both she and the machine burst with light of a trillion stars. For a brief moment, she felt as if she were burning alive in the center of a new Big Bang. In the next second, she was overwhelmed by an awkward numbness.

Maya didn't roughly tumble back to the ground. She didn't fall back to the ground. She slowly drifted downward, before the machine had even finished releasing her from her restraints, and she landed gracefully on her feet. The first thing she noticed was the feeling of earth between her bare toes.

She glanced toward her left arm. Instead of an arm, however, all she saw was a slender cloud of neon fog. After blinking some of the numbness away, she eventually recognized the shape of her arm, albeit she didn't remember it being translucent and purple. Glancing further down, she saw the rest of her body was in the same wispy condition. Her clothes and equipment were strangely absent, but it didn't look like they would be much use to her now. Part of the ground was phasing through her feet.

The robot floated down in front of her, stopping when its headlight "eyes" were level with her own icy, pulsating irises. Jack continued to speak as the machine's voice.

"That slight tingling sensation you just felt was every single atom in your body being split open and infused with enriched Eridium. Sorry about your Vault Hunter gear. Those nanobots take the 'newborn babe' idea a bit literally and kind of go crazy on inorganic material. Or really any material that isn't of Siren nature. I would have warned you beforehand since I probably could have sold off most of your stuff, but you didn't really seem like the type who would have slipped out of her precious belongings just because a charming gentleman asked nicely, eh?"

She didn't answer. Whatever she had been on thinking about previously, any priorities she had before to this moment, were gone. The only thing on her mind now was an instinct to obey.

"I never did figure out how to control the yield on the Eridium. Angel thinks the side effects could be different for everyone, so you'll have to get used to being a naked glowing vapor chick for a while. Maybe permanently. Oh well. You can always just disintegrate someone on sight if you think they're staring at your ass or something."

Maya's illuminated lips curled into a smirk.

"What are your orders?" She asked in a serene voice.

"Ha! That's what Jack likes to hear. Why don't you head on over to Sanctuary and show those losers what a cute little goddess of pain and suffering you are?"

Maya's hand clenched into a fist as violent thoughts filled her head.

"What if I encounter the Firehawk?"

"Oh, her? You're my new number one, and Angel is already covering intel, so I guess I don't really need any more of you Siren folk hanging around this dimension. Prove your evolutionary superiority, end your sibling rivalry, shed her mortal coil, whatever it is that you do. Have fun, Plasma Bunny!"

She nodded in simple agreement. Something in her made the challenge sound enticing.

"Affirmative."

Maya used her renewed powers to teleport out of the ruins. Wherever she reappeared, destruction would follow.


End file.
